Thursday, January 20, 2011

More bull from Brull

ABC News via its The Drum appendage today publishes the 10th post since May 2010 by self-appointed Israel/Palestine expert Michael Brull. Brull's claims to authority, as touted by the ABC:

Michael Brull has a featured blog at Independent Australian Jewish Voices, and is involved in Stop The Intervention Collective Sydney (STICS).

Yet Brull's most recent post at IAJV (like STICS a less than impartial activist organisation) is dated 19 September 2009 and is, in any event, hardly proof of expertise.

Anyway, Brull's The Drum article is nothing more than an anti-Israel opinion piece all tarted up to appear as well-researched. Brull starts off:

We now have even more proof, yet another smoking gun: Israel is deliberately starving the population of Gaza.

Starving? No, not really:

It is true children are not starving to death. There is no “humanitarian crisis”. But Palestinian's are suffering nonetheless:As a brief snapshot, I previously noted that some 66 per cent of babies have anaemia, as do 35 per cent of pregnant women in Gaza.

According to Brull the stated rationale for the blockade, the firing of rockets and mortars from Gaza into Israel is bogus because the blockade is being maintained "even when no rockets have been fired". Wrong. As of 19 January:

So far this month, about 35 rockets and mortar shells have been fired into Israel from Gaza. Israel has indicated that it would invade again, as it did two years ago, if the attacks did not stop, or at least become much less frequent.

What exactly is the ABC trying to accomplish by publishing such tripe? (That's a rhetorical question, the answer to which we all know.)

2 Comments:

Michael Brull is one of very few Israel-haters who actually make Antony Loewenstein appear knowledgeable.

In a Crikey piece, Brull wrote:

“More suicide bombings had been committed by the (secular) Tamil Tigers than any other group”.

Even if you’d never studied anything about the Middle East, a mere five seconds in Google would show that more suicide bombings were carried out by Muslims in a single year, just in one country (Iraq) than by the Tamil Tigers in the last 100 years.

That’s before you account for Jihadis blowing themselves up in dozens of other countries, let alone Israel.

When I called him on this error, he desperately claimed that I had distorted his words and taken his comments out of context.

Noting that he'd said the very same thing previously on Facebook, there's no relevant context at all. He's just flat out wrong. Erroneous. Mistaken. Full of shit.

Just like the time he referred to well known Jewish person "Edward Einfeld". He was referring to Marcus Einfeld, at the time a household name.

Like Loewenstein, Brull takes pleasure in people like me (and Andrew Bolt) calling him a liar and an idiot, believing he must be doing something right in order to attract such criticism.

Touché Dan. It's amazing what these people will publish if no one fact-checks and calls them on it. In fact like Loewenstein, Brull would likely add this ‘achievement’ to his bio: ‘Michael writes for Crikey, the ABC blah, blah, blah’. Keep up the good work - or what the other side likes to call ‘stalking’.